[Darth-Apple]

Hello all, 

We are very excited and pleased to announce that Makestation is back online! A flurry of recent personal events has taken my life by storm, and it’s unfortunately meant I was unable to be here as much as I had hoped. I’m not in the best of places (life has thrown more than a few curveballs for me). I want to be clear that the responsibility lies upon me and me alone, and that the blame does not lie upon SpookyZalost or Guardian. 

I know there will be many questions, which I will do my best to answer in this post and in future communications also. We are working hard to restore Makestation as quickly and completely as possible.

As you have probably already noticed, we have had to restore Makestation from a backup. The good news is that we were (mostly) able to restore things back to where they were before (I'll describe some exceptions in a moment). The bad news is that the most recent backups were unfortunately corrupted and unable to be restored (we have tried our best, but unfortunately we were unable to restore these). This has greatly complicated our efforts, and has meant that we have lost more content than we would have originally liked. 

We selected the most recent backup that was able to be restored successfully, which was from late 2021. This means that all user accounts, avatars, threads, forum organization, structure, and various other things has been restored to this point in time. Makestation files (which contain the site's code, but not necessarily its content itself) was from a slightly older backup. This means that you're looking at a slightly older version of Makestation's theme, along with some of the custom code and plugins that we wrote for the community. This has been less of a concern long-term as we are able to source more recent versions of most of these things from other places (and will be tying loose ends in the coming days and weeks). In other words, some of the missing features will be coming back soon.

This restoration means that we do have a decent amount of work set out for us (especially with regards to lost content). Many of the more challenging aspects of getting the site itself restored are behind us, and continuing work will take place as we take care of some of the other details. I would also like to take this time to allude to the future of Makestation and what some of these changes mean for the long term prospects of the community. 

As many of you know, Makestation started as a high school project of mine during my senior year. We wanted to create a creative arts community that had an open and tight knit community, one that was run in a democratic spirit and one that was laid back and open to creative projects of all kinds. Seeing Makestation blossom to the size that it became was a dream come true, and I never imagined that the website would still exist all these years later. It not only met our dreams, but it exceeded them, and I can't take the credit for that. I founded this community and poured many blood, sweat, and tears into it, but it was all of the amazing people, members and staff alike, who contributed to this community, helped to build it from the ground up, promoted this community, built connections with other forums, created amazing content, and participated in the community spirit that brought us to where we are. This community is here not because of me, but because of YOU. You built this community, and it is because of you that it stands. 

There will be some leadership changes in the coming days, weeks, and months (which I will allude to more in the coming days). I won't go into full detail quite yet, as we are still focused on getting MS back on its feet first. However, due to some personal events in my life, I will unfortunately be unable to run Makestation full time in the long-term at this time. I think that it is only right to transfer the full ownership of the community to the other two administrators who have served this community diligently for the past several years. SpookyZalost and Guardian will soon inherent full ownership and lead administration of Makestation, and will be taking this community into many bright years to come during the transition. I will, of course, still be around as well and will be a part of this community as I am able (and expect to help out with various things as well). But I also have FULL faith in these two administrators (and to the Makestation community as a whole) to bring Makestsation to new heights that it has never seen before. These are two of the best administrators I have ever had the pleasure of working with (and I've worked with many across several communities, so I don't say this lightly). And I also have full faith that because of YOU, Makestation's best years are ahead of us, NOT behind us. 

We greatly apologize for the downtime and for the significant inconveniences caused during the restoration process. We expect that there will be some bugs and various other things that need to be taken care of, so absolutely feel free to share any and all suggestions, feedback, ideas, and comments here as well (where we will be happy to address them). Any account related concerns can also be addressed in the Official Makestation Discord, where we can help address any possible login or registration related issues.

We want this thread to serve as an open discussion for the current events and for the future of Makestation. I know that there will be many questions, which we will be very happy to be able to address. Many thanks to the entire Makestation community, for whom this community would not be possible without. We built this community collectively AS a community effort, and we are committed to making sure that it will live on in the same spirit for many years to come! 

Best regards, 
-Darth